A Modest Proposal re: SF's Pooping Problem
Y'all are making it hard for no reason
In the park, I saw a homeless guy shitting in a bush. We made eye contact. Neither of us was happy about the situation.
For inscrutable opaque reasons, SF can’t build a public bathroom for less than $1.7M. I want to assume this is corruption, because “corruption” is the comfortable answer that preserves my sanity. It’s so much grimmer if it isn’t corruption, actually! Imagine if the bureaucracy really is that tangled, and there’s no mafioso in the middle laughing and drinking a martini made with human tears as he pockets the embezzled million and a half. Imagine that hellworld.
For the sake of our mutual humanity, let’s do napkin math on how much it would cost to rent a hundred portapotties and deploy them by every hotspot.
(People have made a variety of tracking heatmaps for poops already, from the businesslike Code 311 Explorer to the more flavorful (Human) Wasteland)
Portapotties cost about three hundred dollars per week per toilet.
(How many visits does each toilet have in it before it needs servicing? Oh, the $300 includes weekly servicing; let’s put it on a heavier service schedule and say it’s $500 now.)
(How many toilets do we actually need?)
There’s seven thousand homeless folks in SF.
(A hundred toilets seems sparse. Let’s…quadruple that, and end up targeting one on each intersection within that grid. That grid looks like it has four hundred intersections in it, give or take. I am doing cowboy math, here; we’re allowed to be imprecise.)
Okay; four hundred toilets, $500/month/apiece; $200k/month.
(We could probably get bulk discounts if we’re The Government. Let’s not rely on those. When we try to spin this into a charitable grant proposal and/or YC startup (“Poopr”) we should assume no special treatment.)
Okay. $200k per month.
That seems honestly pretty cheap? Not entirely sure how to weigh the breakeven for “furnish one permanent bathroom to the homeless population installed for $1.7M” vs “furnish four hundred bathrooms running for eight months for $1.6M”. Especially given that The Golden Throne took two years to get installed.
(Am I missing something important in my hubris? What’s the life cycle of a permanent city public toilet? Ah, twenty years or so, because they’re usually hard-used and vandalized. Well, I could probably calculus out the breakeven point for these. It’s only rocket science.)
$1,700,000 / 20 = $85,000
$500 * 12 = $6000
……but the built building isn’t a total wash, right? It’ll somehow cut costs later.
“Ongoing maintenance budget of 3-5% of construction cost annually”
$1,700,000 * 0.03 = $51,000
(Nope, fuck it, I’m out. Why do we have toilets at all if this is what everything costs. I am confused, society is rotted and sick and calls for the purity of the flame.)
Four hundred portapotties on street corners. How might we do this.
There are regulatory issues, because of course there are. San Francisco doesn’t let you just drop off a portapotty on the sidewalk, because the sidewalk is public property.
(It also won’t let you put a portapotty on private property without permission, either)
None of these yet seem like reason to stop.
Plan A: Friendly grassroots campaign asking people in the hot zone: “Say, has anyone ever pooped on your property? Would you consent for us to put a portapotty here for a week and see whether it prevents that? Tick this box.”
Plan B: Guerilla logistics terrorist unilaterally solves SF’s pooping problem via the braindead plan of putting four hundred portapotties on street corners.
just commit crimes you coward